Sunday, February 01, 2009

Hourly Comics

If, like me, you enjoy watching the nightly news or reading the paper, then you already know that the printed newspaper business is about as hot as a frozen burrito. Unfortunately, this "particular" burrito is unlikely to be warmed up in any kind of microwave no matter how powerful because everyone, it seems, would much rather get their burritos from the internet.

Funny food analogies aside, I can tell you this: I read a lot of blogs. And my interests what they are, most of those blogs are about comics: from traditional Sunday paper comics like Bizarro and Kevin and Kell, to underground comics like Cat and Girl and Hark! A Vagrant. (Admittedly, there can be overlap here. Categories aren't really my thing.) In any case, I follow about 250 blogs, although a small few of them are like this one - - very infrequent about posting. (Ugh. I stink!)

Anyway, this is where feed readers come in. Most every blog has an RSS feed, a fact which is very much like my saying that most cars have cupholders. Both things are equally likely to make you think, "so what?" Okay, point taken.

The nice thing about RSS feeds is what they can be read by "RSS Feed Aggregators." (No, not alligators! Aggregators!) These aggregators allow you track and collect the new posts of your various favorite blogs so that you have a single place to visit and read them all. One such of these aggregators is Bloglines. That is the one I use, but there are a handful of others.

When you have successfully subscribed to a handful of blogs, you will soon see the similarity they have to newspapers. Both give a daily source of information. In this case, the information is from online blogs as opposed to printed on a dead tree and from a wire service.

All of this is a really, really long way of saying, if you read blogs and haven't yet learned how to subscribe to them through RSS feeds, you're missing out. In fact, you could be subscribing to this very blog! (He says, as he hopes against hope! You won't break my heart if you don't. Really, you won't...I'll just have a good cry, and try to think about happier times... Heh, another joke.)

It is from one of the many blogs that read in my aggregator that I found out about Hourly Comics, my next project! If everything goes according to plan, I will be posting an accounting of my entire Februray 1st, in comic form! (Well, posting all of the waking hours of it anyway.) Soon, you will see here the various highlights, such as they are, of my entire day.

I am not sure how this is going to turn out, but needless to say, I hope good. I've neglected my little blog here for too long, and it is time I get the burrito rolling again. I mean ball...the ball rolling, ahem....take two. It is time I get the ball rolling again. (Not burritos. That would be silly.)

3 Comments:

At 1:59 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Interesting that you should mention alligators in this context - I just posted my own explanation of RSS in a slightly more condescending fashion here: http://www.awesomepedia.org/rss/

 
At 4:54 AM, Blogger z. said...

Woot! Hooray for RSS alligators and RSS dinosaurs. I think I should check out Google reader. It sounds interesting and it would be fun to compare it to what I have been used to.

 
At 12:08 PM, Anonymous dishnetwork said...

I don't think that burritos can roll can they? Ha ha.

 

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